Coaching can help you get new persepctives, unlock new ideas and refresh your attitude to work and life in general. A new coaching programme can feel just right at the start of a new year!
I have space for a few new coaching clients starting in February and March this year. If you are interested please get in touch. I offer the first exploratory session for free for new clients.
email: caroline@carolinegriffin.com
I am now offering marketing surgery packagies for small and vokuntary sector arts organisations. These feature a scoping phone call, preparation and analysis, a 1-2-1 meeting plus follow up reporting. The idea is to provide a quick, targeted response to particular marketing problems. Surgeries are tailored to your particular needs but off the peg options include:
As a specialist in small and voluntary sector organisations all activities are tailored to the organisation, with an emphasis on avoiding market jargon and working with people who are not marketing specialists. There is also a focus throughout on resource management to make any suggestions manageable and appropriate to the size of the organisation.
Surgery packages cost £400 plus expenses and plus any mapping or reporting if required.
Please contact me for more information on caroline [@] carolinegriffin.com
I have put together an outline of all my consultancy and coaching services. Please see below:
Caroline Griffin Consultancy & Coaching Services, October 2011
Project Development, Direction & Management I am experienced in delivering large-scale collaborative audience development projects, such as A Night Less Ordinary (a national project offering free theatre tickets to 16-26 year olds) and The Big Picture (a West Midlands regional project that created a record-breaking photo montage from images submitted by the public). I also work with groups and partnerships on a strategic level, for example I worked with the Derbyshire Arts Development Group to produce an audience development framework for the region.
My skills in this area include:
Strategic audience development support I work with individual organisations on creating and delivery of audience development strategies and plans and audience focused organisational change projects. My skills in this area include:
Coaching I am an accredited Executive Coach, trained through the Cultural Leadership Programme and affiliated with the Association for Coaching.
As a coach I work with my coachees to create an open and supportive space to focus on achieving professional goals. It is a creative, warm and challenging process that helps individuals to:
- Review and develop their sense of what really matters
- Explore new approaches and create a sense of momentum to try them out
- Get to know and cherish your strengths and explore how to use and develop them
- Get out of a rut and feel refreshed
A coaching series usually consist of six one to one-and-a-half hour sessions that take place once a month over six – eight months.
Training & Mentoring I am an experienced trainer and over the last few years have worked for Cultivate, the University of Nottingham, and the Arts Marketing Association (among others) to develop training courses on all aspects of marketing, audience development and particularly on marketing planning. Although usually delivered to a mixed group, training days can be adapted to be delivered to a small group in-house (for example new members of staff in a marketing team), and can be tailored, (for example, marketing for box office staff).
I am a trained and experienced mentor and have experience of working one-two-one with staff ib marketing and audience development roles at all levels of an organisation. Mentoring relationships generally last nine to twelve months and are focused on supporting entry into a new job, transition to a new role or a specific project.
Other services I also offer a variety of other practical marketing and audience development services using my experience in this area as required. For example, brochure development, evaluation, event and conference planning and writing grant applications.
Contact If you are interested in talking to me about a project please don’t hesitate to get in touch using the contact details below.
Caroline Griffin Caroline [@] carolinegriffin.com 07787 505166
In October this year I will be leading a session called ‘Data for Marketing Campaigns in Small Organisations’ as part of the Building Better Businesses training scheme. This event is part of the Turning Point project and is aimed at small visual arts organisations. The programme as a whole includes 4 other training days including sessions on fundraising, advocacy and audience development. The sessions are free for organisations receiving Arts Council funding and are taking place at locations across the country. They can be booked online here.
I’m delighted to have become an Earlyarts coach.
Earlyarts is the largest national network supporting people in the arts, culture, and early years sectors who work and play creatively with young children and their families. Earlyarts Members benefit from being connected with over 5,000 amazing people who inspire, inform, train, and help them to do their job better.
You can use the Earlyarts map to find coaches working on the scheme and if you are a Gold or Silver Earlyarts member you will get your first session for free.
In my experience of supporting a wide range of artists, arts organisations and new creative enterprises, the most successful are those which have a strong business footing.
Ensuring that your business is set up in a way that supports the activity you want to do, supports creativity and allows it to flourish. Organisations that feel that doing so is putting money beofre the art, often end up spending far more time trying to make ends meet and in difficult conversations with funders or with their own Board, about how they are going to maintain the business in the middle to long term.
Good news then that a new toolkit has been published that offers clear help for new businesses to select the best business model and set themselves up effectively. The Business Survival Toolkit is a service from Creative & Cultural Skills, the Sector Skills Council for the creative industries, in partnership with the Crafts Council, the Cultural Leadership Programme, the Design Council and the Heritage Lottery Fund – so it is robust and well supported. It’s also free – so there’s no reason for putting it off – why not get your board involved or work on it with your colleagues or volunteers?
Following a busy year of project management, I am now able to start offering coaching services as well as training, consultancy and project services.
I am an accredited Relational Dynamics coach specialising in working in the cultural and creative sectors in the UK. I am an Affiiliate of the Association for Coaching.
I work with a range of clients to support transformation on a personal, professional and organisational basis. As a coach I work with you to create an open and supportive space where you can focus on achieving your personal and professional goals. Through this creative, warm and challenging process, you will be able to
- Review and develop your sense of what really matters
- Explore new approaches and create a sense of momentum to try them out
- Get to know and cherish your strengths and explore how to use and develop them
- Get out of a rut and feel refreshed
I offer the initial consultation on ‘no obligation’ basis. The session is chargeable only if you choose to continue for a series. I am based in the West Midlands and can offer one-to-one coaching in person and via telephone or Skype.
There’s no such thing as a free lunch . . . but there is such a thing as a free theatre ticket. If you are under 26 you can get hold of free theatre tickets through the A Night Less Ordinary scheme. Theatres, rural touring schemes and other venues across the country are participating in the scheme and want to give tickets away. The scheme will be closed at the end of March 2011 so now is the time to take advantage of the offer.
Visit the A Night Less Ordinary website to see what tickets are available near you. Some tickets can be booked online by clicking on the link on the site – otherwise you will need to phone the theatres’ box office to book.
Good luck with finding something great to see – hope you enjoy A Night Less Ordinary!
. . . . for a year or so, so sorry that there haven’t been any updates to this site. I’m now working again and so look forward to new posts on arts and cultural marketing audience development and other musings!
My main project at the moment is A Night Less Ordinary a national project that makes free theatre tickets available to under 26s.
Learning to share
Arts organisations feel vulnerable. This is no surprise for a sector that is used to living on thin and unreliable resources, and being valued for our instrumental impacts rather than the intrinsic value of what we do. One of the ways the sector has countered this impression is by developing extremely high levels of professionalism. We’ve developed ourselves as viable businesses, our plans, policies and procedures providing evidence that we take ourselves seriously, and that we expect to be taken seriously by others.
While I applaud organisations that are run properly and efficiently and which are effective at advocacy and meeting targets, I do wonder whether we should re-appraise how this approach can affect our relationships with audiences. Recently it seems that the brands that are doing well are those that allow their audiences to take some ownership of the values, activity and approach of the organisation. This is antithetical to traditional brand theory which has regarded fierce protection of every aspect of the brand to be crucial.
Led by new technologies which have enabled all of us to be able to have choice over aspects of our lives that we wouldn’t have dreamed about a few years ago – audiences want to be involved. And if they like you, there’s a chance that they will want to use your brand, share your video or comment on your work. This raises a challenge to arts organsiations, stuck in the rut of providing a glossy, untouchable outward face, a professional veneer to disguise our fear that others will see our vulnerability. That our audiences might know that we are not perfect, that we are struggling, that we sometimes get things wrong.
It’s a major shift, to let our audiences share our brand, admit their ideas into our planning, in effect, to see them as much a part of our organisation as our buildings, our staff, our brand. the world is changing quickly though, and it seems likley that those organisations that are prepared to let down their guard, and enjoy our audiences desire to share and be part of what we do, will be the ones thriving in the future.
Posted by Caroline Griffin on August 7, 2009 in Audience development, digital, Ideas, Opinion
Tags: Audience development, audiences, comment, Ideas, Opinion